Baldratia Kieffer, 1897

Elsayed, Ayman Khamis, Skuhravá, Marcela, Karam, Hedaya Hamza, Elminshawy, Abdelaziz & Al-Eryan, Mohamed Awad, 2015, New records and new species of gall midges (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) developing on Chenopodiaceae in Egypt, Zootaxa 3904 (1), pp. 105-115 : 108

Genus Baldratia Kieffer, 1897

Baldratia is a Palaearctic genus with 38 species ( Gagné & Jaschhof 2014). Larvae induce galls on stems and leaves of the family Chenopodiaceae mainly in Central Asia. Four species were previously described on the basis of material found in Egypt ( Möhn 1969). The genus Baldratia is characterized by the following combination of morphological characters ( Fedotova 1992; Dorchin & Freidberg 2008): the female ovipositor has a ventrally curved aculeus and a lateral plate that bears simple or split setae; adults generally have relatively long legs and one or two segmented palpi; apical antennal flagellomeres are often fused and the number of flagellomeres may vary within the same species and even in the same individual. Larvae have a bilobed spatula ( Möhn 1969).

Fedotova (1992) mentioned that the aculeus was evenly covered with 2 rows of long apically bent setae. In the present study, it is very clear that the aculeus bears 3 rows of these setae in both B. salicorniae and the new species described below.